In Which Kinsler Bonds With the Soil

It has finally thawed out enough to think about Outside and so yesterday, trapped here by the guy who was working on the furnace all day, I at last turned my attention to the garden, which has been growing worse over the seven years we've lived here.

I originally dug it out of a perfectly innocent lawn in back of the house, and at about twenty feet square it's already bigger than we'd need if we were to do things as efficiently as we have in our past, rented nests. It was great the first year. I dug out the tons of turf, and threw some fertilizer on, and God's dump truck backed in bearing nature's bounty within a few weeks. The next year was even better, but subsequent years have brought one or another crop failure--the nineteen-spotted Mexican bean beetle, no rain, too much rain, and generally the sort of conditions that would have finished us off from famine if our garden was anything but the academic and recreational exercise that it is.

I suppose I keep looking for salvation through innovation out there. There has been a succession of creatively-engineered and unsuccessful vine supports, the four grape vines (still thriving, albeit without many grapes) the giant rhubarb and the mysterious asparagus (respectively deceased and surviving as of this week) the drip irrigation scheme, the sprinkler-on-a-tower scheme, the newspaper mulch, the straw mulch (Natalie's idea, which is why we have a crop of oats every year) and the black fabric. To aid access to the crops, there were the stepping stones that got lost in the weeds, and the ladders laid atop timbers, which also got lost.

We planted cucumbers which tasted lousy, and bell peppers which were worse. Squash and zucchini died. The original canteloupes we planted were great, but how many can you eat?. Last year the honeydew plants died, were replaced, and after a lot of trouble yielded one (1) inedible melon.

The bean beetles are voracious, and so I watch for them with a fanaticism born of a complete crop loss our third year. The weeds are clever and resourceful, none so much as the morning glories, which harbor bean beetles until the favored bean plants sprout. We pull them out by the pound, but nothing grows faster. Pre-emergent herbicides simply encouraged them, and the fact that they're by far the most attractive thing I've ever been able to grow doesn't help matters one bit.

Now, seven years older than I was when I was vigorously spading everything in sight, I am wondering if there is something else wrong. Can it be, wonders the young botanist, that the soil has been depleted? I've been putting 12-12-12 garden fertilizer on along with the slug bait, but maybe our dirt is suffering from a serious osmium deficiency or something.

And so it's time to get the soil analyzed. I once did this for Natalie's mother in Pittsburgh; lugging a sample down to the state ag extension agent in an office in a section of the Strip District that last saw a garden when the Algonquins lived there. It needed sulfur and/or bone meal, which we dutifully applied. The problem there is that Natalie's mother could grow papayas on a slab of solid granite, with a border of strawberries, which we also can't grow because the damn birds eat them all.

Well, they don't have state soil testing labs in Ohio, so I this morning I looked up a place and with some difficulty called them back. The office staff wasn't too efficient, and their web page wasn't quite updated in 1999, but the lady I talked to was friendly and funny and told me to just bring in the sample.

She's right across the street from the CVS on State Street in Westerville, she said, and since I know the area I said fine. On my way out to go to Columbus for my piano lesson, I combined three shovelfuls of dirt in a yellow Carnival Foods plastic bag and headed off.

It was getting late by the time I got near the CVS, and behold, there was no trace of any address like 130 S State Street. It went from 180 to 98, with Westerville's large white-pillared Masonic Temple, the public library, and a doctor's office in between. I went back around the block. It was a long block, and I found myself imitating an imaginary local sage: "Hah! Ye took the 'nevercomeback' block, did ye, sonny? Waal, they say that the road crew laid that out as a little joke, they did! Hee hee!"

I found my way back to State Street and parked in front of the Westerville Library. Walked in and found myself in a long hallway, with display cases and windows that looked into a library, but with no way to actually enter the library except through a carefully-marked EMERGENCY door. Hee hee, sonny! Gotcha again!

One stray library person urged me to keep the faith down the length of the hallway, all the way to the back of the building, where I was assured there was a telephone book at the circulation desk. I wondered if the anti-theft devices would be concerned about my yellow plastic bag of dirt. Suspected terrorist captured in library, carrying depleted soil, say authorities.

Where the hell, I asked politely, was the soil testing place supposed to be? Nobody'd ever heard of it, but then ("Hark!", said the Sage) someone remembered something about such a place and went to ask.

It was in the basement of the Masonic Temple. Perfectly obvious.

Even then, it was a near thing. I walked across the lot, through the wind, with my yellow bag of dirt. Well, here's the door. No, it isn't, unless they've decided to brick the place up since I called this morning. Well, here's the door. Not unless they've set up shop in a door-less alcove. Sure looked like a door at first.

There was one more side of the big brick building left, and one door, less likely than the others, had an illegible sign on it. I tried it, and it opened.

Down into Dracula's tomb I went, armed only with my yellow bag of sacred earth to ward off the evil that lurked in that concrete hallway. Another door.

I don't know how gleaming I expected it to be, but there I was in the midst of a very large hall of shelves, each bearing racks and racks of what I suppose were compressed soil samples. There wasn't a counter or anything; I was just in the middle of their storage room. I called hello.

Hi, said a pleasant voice. It belonged to an attractive young woman, somewhat busy and flustered, wearing a lab coat. Turns out that the whole operation is the two of them; it's owned by a bigger outfit in Indiana, and they test thousands of samples from throughout the Midwest. She efficiently filled out a form, relieved me of the accursed yellow bag, and told me that they'd be testing it on Thursday, and would send me the analysis and a bill. Please don't pay now.

Every day is an adventure, but you just never know which ones are scheduled.

M Kinsler